One of the teachers in a video story of this argues "the problem is funding - show me a properly funded school and I'll show you an efficient and successful school".
The other side of the coin is that "tenure" makes removal of problem teachers (even convicted sex offenders) extremely difficult and expensive to remove. I only caught the tail end of the video report, but it appeared the head of the Los Angeles Unified School system was comparing the cost of administration to the cost of legal expenses incurred in trying to get rid of 'bad teachers', complaining that a huge part of his school budget was wasted on such litigation.
It's been a long time, but at one time I had a series of studies showing the relationship of funding to "success" in various schools, and it seemed to indicate that more funding was INVERSELY related to better schools.
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